Last July, Jordi Nadal became the Managing Director of the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera (FBG) of the University of Barcelona. Naval, who holds a BSc in Pharmacy from the UB and a BSc in Biochemistry from the UAB, has co-founded five companies in the field of health: Infociencia, Anaxomics, Enemce Pharma, Genocosmetics, and HIV-Therapeutics. All of them share the same feature: the transformation of different technologies into products and services with social and economic value. He is also the founder and president of the Fundació Escola Emprenedors, a non-profit organization dedicated to provide training in entrepreneurship and business knowledge for students engaged in professional training, high-school, undergraduate, and graduate students. After just over three months leading the FBG, he shares his views on the situation of knowledge transfer in Catalonia, and the guidelines he has set for himself in this new task.

Does Barcelona have potential as a centre of knowledge transfer and innovation?

Some people have publicly declared that we could become the new Boston, in the sense that we have sufficient concentration of universities, companies, and human capital in the same area. Certain processes and a certain critical mass concur at a certain place and completely transform the economy of a city and its immediate region. But several elements are needed in order to get there. The first one is a high scientific level, which we certainly have; and we can assert that because scientific level is the easiest factor to measure in a rather indisputable way. We belong to the most advanced group, neither better nor worse than Germany, the United Kingdom, or the United States. It is usually assumed that if your publishing activity in scientific journals is good enough, much of that knowledge should be transferible.

What do we need to make it transferable? Two basic things are required. On the one hand, we need people in the innovation ecosystem that take it as a personal task. As in the case of Boston, these usually are entrepreneurs, investors, or people in the public administration that act as mediators, promoters, and catalysts for knowledge transfer. Knowledge transfer institutions may also undertake this role, as it happens in Israel, for example. On the other hand, we need capital. Right now, in Catalonia, in Barcelona, we do have both things, and they are becoming available in a rather spectacular fashion. For example, in the field of technology entrepreneurship, I don’t know whether we could speak of a bubble, but the number of well-funded companies and entrepreneurs, and the importance of foreign investment in local companies are rather impressive. The fields affected by these factors are diverse: from financial technology (FinTech), to mobile applications, e-commerce, the Internet of Things (IoT)... It's a truly splendid moment.

For instance, in the field of biotechnology, nearly one hundred million euros have been invested in six biotechnology companies from Barcelona in the span of a year. It is a remarkable figure. Most of it is foreign investment; that is, in addition to local funds—such as Caixa Capital Risc, Ysios Capital, HealthEquity, and Inveready, which are the local investment funds in life sciences—these companies have been able to attract American and European funds, who have confidence in projects created here.

As a scientist, I speak in terms of hypotheses, and the hypothesis now in force is the following: “Barcelona is the next big thing. The place to be.” If you are an investor from San Francisco or Boston, an investor in life sciences (although this also applies to any other field), your first idea is: “I want to invest in ten biotechnology projects. First, I look for those projects with the most solid research base. Among my options I am considering American projects, projects from Heidelberg ... and projects from Barcelona.” But in analysing the American projects, you realize that “there is so much money in circulation here, and the Americans are so smart, that these projects have a very high rating. That is, they are expensive. In contrast, in Barcelona, I have less competition from other investors. So, somehow, my money would be more efficient in Barcelona than in San Francisco. I can do better in Barcelona than in San Francisco.” And this is exactly the scenario right now.

But currently, it seems that the research carried out in Catalonia is not transferred, that it does not reach society.

Unfortunately, that is absolutely true. The number of scientific publications from universities and research centres in Catalonia is at its highest level: this is an objective fact. However, and also speaking objectively, the revenue generated by research (patents, spin-off companies and so on) is much lower than it should be; although the overall economic impact of the university on society is still very high.

To change this, we have to expand the field of vision of researchers first. In addition to their research, which is already excellent, they also need to think about how this research can benefit society: benefit patients, in the case of biomedicine, benefit users, in the case of electronic instruments, benefit detergent production, in the case of chemistry ... How can we expand their field of vision? Basically, by promoting dialogue and personal interaction between researchers and the following three critical groups.

First, they need to interact with the entrepreneurs working in their sector. The best way to imagine how researchers can get their product to society is to speak with someone who has already done it. The figure of the serial entrepreneur who has created technology-based companies—a very American, very Anglo-Saxon figure—is central to the ecosystem. Their role is to stimulate, encourage, and guide researchers to follow in their footsteps and to avoid the mistakes they first made.

Secondly, we must interact with investors: people who have the money to help carrying out knowledge transfer, and also a very clear idea whether or not something is transferable, or can be valorised.

Thirdly, of course, it is necessary to foster interaction with companies. Companies think in terms of products, whereas researchers think in terms of research, and they should know each other far better.

What must be the role of the administration?

The administration—and this is a given—should encourage interaction and exchange in various ways. For starters, it is a matter of dialogue, which is an important aspect and requires few resources, namely organizational changes and the promotion of new relatively inexpensive activities. Moreover, there is obviously the question of money, of financial instruments that facilitate knowledge transfer and involve all parties. Grants are interesting, no one says no to a grant; but there are better options. I would suggest, for example, guaranteed soft loans and public participation in private investment funds, so that individuals stake their money on transferable projects, but their investment is accompanied and complemented by public funds that give projects the minimum capital to make them effective.

What do university-company collaboration projects need to work? The FBG has examples of successful collaborations that have been going on for many years.

To make university-company collaboration work, we need three things. The first one is approaching companies. We can do that by presenting the catalogue with the whole portfolio of the University of Barcelona, which basically includes everything (technically, our offer is infinite); but this option is not very effective. The most effective way is to ask the company about their shortcomings, that is, about their production problems, their market, or the technology they want to develop and don’t know how; moreover, we can ask them about the things they already have and would like to improve. The idea is to ask about the short– and long–term challenges that companies are facing.

Secondly, we need to think in terms of product. Companies need their product to be more effective, cheaper, better, to have higher quality, to achieve greater customer satisfaction. Finally, all successful collaborations require company managers and R & D heads to acknowledge the added value that university researchers contribute with their time, their expertise, their equipment, and specialization, which all taxpayers have funded. Researchers, research groups, and the University have needed a long time to acquire such knowledge. This should be formally respected, but also paid for accordingly.

In your new position, what is your take on the mission of the FBG?

At the Fundació Bosch i Gimpera, we must act as professional catalysts for these interactions. As part of the administration we cannot create companies, but we must ensure that they are correctly created. It is not our place to decide the needs of a company, but to foster dialogue between researchers and companies. We have to be there and act as translators. Just like a synchrotron, our function is to accelerate particles so that they collide and interact with each other. These shocks between “company–particles” and “scientist–particles” will result in the emergence of new energies.

What goals would you like to achieve in the coming years as head of the FBG?

The overall goal is to shake out the ecosystem and foster interactions and collisions. Our aim is to help researchers and research groups, which have enormous potential, to interact with us—of course—with the FBG, but mainly with scientific entrepreneurs who speak the same language, with investors, with potential buyers of these technologies, and with companies.

Quantifying a specific goal is very difficult, because it depends on factors that are not under our control. Academics and researchers have made great efforts over the past five years to carry out their research with few resources. Budget cuts have affected them enormously and it was a very hard time. In fact, we are still not sure which part of the cycle we are in right now: in the upstream end, the recovery, in a stable position, in the downstream end... What I would really like as a quantifiable objective is that, soon, most researchers that don’t think about a spin-off, a patent, or licence—because they find them too complicated—would understand this language, and consider these options. I would also like that they looked for money beyond European projects, scholarships, and grants; that they expanded their funding opportunities by engaging in joint research projects with companies, through the creation of spin-offs, the sale of patents, and technology licencing. I want them to interact with entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, and companies so that all of these concepts add to the natural language of researchers and their agenda. I think that this would be a way to lay solid foundations for what is to come next.

Fuente: Fundació Bosch i Gimpera

http://www.fbg.ub.edu/post/es/273
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